We had a fab day celebrating our Elmer learning on Friday. All the children looked brilliant and we had lots of different Elmer's. I have a chosen a couple of photos for you to see, a sample of some of the fun we had.
We have enjoyed, baking, painting, making patterns, colour mixing, painting with berries, making play dough elephants, sorting different size elephants, eating Elmer shaped toast and lots lots more. We have thoroughly enjoyed learning with Elmer.

Just a reminder about Elmer's special day on Friday 4th May, please dress your child as their chosen elephant. Please do not stress, this just means wearing the colour tshirt, shirt or dress that they have chosen to be, we are making the masks in school.
We have been finding out about Elmer and his friends and have been learning about colour, patterns, number, letters, and lots lots more along the way. During our thinking Thursday discussions the children suggested a special day in class, so we have arranged Elmer's special day, where the children can come to school dressed as their favourite elephant. It may be one that they have seen in the story, or a favourite colour, we discussed that everybody is different and in the story all the elephants were different on Elmer's special day. We are hoping to have lots of fun in class, watch this space for the photos !!

The sun was shining and we were all smiling on Friday 30th March, it was our Nursery Easter bonnet parade, and wow what a beautiful parade it was too!

All the children looked amazing with their bonnet creations, we have some very clever pupils, parents and grandparents. Well done to everyone for helping our bonnet parade be a success. I think you will all agree the children looked beautiful and seeing them on stage made them all look very grown up, lots of singing, poems, actions and smiles.
We had a lovely last day of term with our bonnet parade, we ate jelly and blaumange which we named 'Wibble and Wobble' and we had an Easter egg hunt, we were all very lucky because we all found a Cadbury's egg yum yum !!

Spring term has come to an end, and a well deserved break is welcomed for all. We look forward to a busy Summer term ahead of us, with lots more exciting things happening and lots lots more to learn about. Enjoy the Easter break, and we look forward to hearing the children's holiday news when they return.
Happy Easter, Pasg Hapus i chi

What a busy term we have had in class Whitcombe. We have had lots of fun and lots to talk about this term, our Eisteddfod, our 10th Birthday and Easter celebrations. Children in class Whitcombe are growing up quickly and are very busy bees !!
On March 1st we had a very successful St David's Day Eisteddfod and the foundation phase celebrated in style, lots of fun, cheering, songs and music. We were very proud of the children in nursery for getting up on stage with confidence and big smiles infront of such a large audience. Especially proud of individuals who took part in stage events Rhys Chater, Carys Watts, Ioan Davies, Caitlin Smith and David Attwood a huge clap to you !! We also had some winners in the off stage events, well done to all the children for taking part.

Last week was our '10th Birthday' and we had an amazing week. It was also 'Teddy Tim's 1st Birthday' and he was a spoilt little teddy. We made cards, decorations, cakes, pizzas, bunting, hats, presents, party bags, photo frames, balloons and lots lots more, our classroom is looking very colourful indeed, we love it. We enjoyed going out to see the hot air balloon too, it was so big !! We had a party on Friday afternoon, with games, lots of singing and dancing and party food, it was a great day to end a fabulous week for us all.











Friday was also a very special day for Luke Willicombe in our class because he was part of the special birthday ceremony with Mrs Lugg. Luke was asked as the youngest pupil in Maes yr Haul to join Mrs Lugg and the eldest pupil in Maes yr Haul to unveil the mural plaque infront of the whole school, Luke was a little bit nervous, but he did he super job, and I think he turned into a superstar with all the photographs that were being taken. Well done Luke, Ardderchog !!!

Blwyddyn Newydd Dda !!

Happy New Year and welcome back to spring term 2012. The children have settled well after an exciting Christmas break, and have had lots to talk about after Santa's visit. We were pleased to hear that our Nursery children had been on his good list!!

We have a busy term ahead with lots of exciting things to look forward to.
Our topic this term is 'Wonderful Wales' alongside 'Blooming Marvellous'. We will be learning about our country and preparing for our St David's Day celebration on March 1st. We will be having a foundation phase Eisteddfod to celebrate and all the children will be taking part in competitions, team meetings and class activities to celebrate. Your child has been put into a team, and on the day your child can come to school wearing traditional Welsh costume/ rugby shirt or team colours. We will put a class list of team colours on the window for all parents to see.

Team colours are :
Ewenni - Red
Llynfi - Blue
Ogwr - Green
Garw - Yellow

We will keep you updated with news and information about our Eisteddfod.

A few dates for your diary this term:

*School INSET ( school closed )- Friday 3rd February
*Finish for half term - Friday 10th February
* Back to school - Monday 20th February
* Parents meetings - Wednesday 22nd February & Thursday 23rd February
* Eisteddfod - Thursday 1st March
* Maes yr Haul 10th Birthday celebrations - March 19th
*Nursery Easter bonnet parade - Wednesday 28th March @ 9:15am
*Finish school for Easter - Friday 30th March

Dosbarth Meithrin Whitcombe

Yippee we have managed to make it through our first half term in school, it has been a long few weeks. We have been very busy learning lots of new and exciting things, we have made lots of new friends and are still trying to learn everyones names!!! We had lots of fun learning a song for the harvest assembly, we tried our best to sing in our big voices but we had never been in the hall with so many children before and we forgot to sing very loud, but never mind Miss Rees was still very proud of us because we looked wonderful in the hats that we made to wear that showed all the harvest food we were singing about. As a part of our harvest activities we read the story 'The Little Red Hen' we enjoyed the story so much that we made our own bread it was hard work to make but tasted delicious when we had it with our milk at the end of the day, we liked it so much we could have eaten more!!!

We still have lots more fun things to do in school after half term and it's going to very busy with christmas on the way!!!! we need a big rest over the half term holiday so that we have lots of energy for the next half term that includes children and staff!!!

Have a fun and safe half term holiday and we will all see each other bright and early when we come back.

We are so proud of how the boys and girls have settled into the nursery and made new friends. We are encouraging the children to put their coats on independently, eat their lunch using their knife and fork and share and take turns with their new friends.

We have been very very busy learning lots of new things, our focus has been traditional tales and nursery rhymes, we have read 'Jack and the Beanstalk' and sang 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'.

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday October 4th in our 'Tray and Display' evening from
3:40-6:00pm there will be an opportunity to look around the classroom, see your children's work and speak to the teacher.

We have had a very busy summer term and have learnt lots of new things in our 'Let's Discover' topic. We have learnt about 'Healthy Eating' where we looked at lots of different food that keep our bodies fit and healthy, we learnt about the different food groups and how much we should eat from each group. We made our own smoothie using a 'smoothie maker' and had lots of fun drinking the smoothie in our very own 'Smoothie Bar'. Our topic has allowed us to discover many things and after looking at 'Healthy Food' we moved on to 'Space'. We all enjoyed discovering about the planets and their names, we made our own rockets using kitchen rolls and lots of different materials. In our PE lessons we pretended to make our own rocket to take us to the moon and what a bumpy ride we had! once we landed we 'floated' around until it was time to come home, we all had a big adventure that day. After discovering 'Space' we moved on to 'Dinosaurs' we had lots of fun with this topic, we discovered lots of different named dinosaurs and looked at the meat eaters and plant eaters. We drew our own dinosaurs on the computer and named them after ourselves and we even made our own dinosaur footprints! What we all enjoyed the most was going outside to measure our very own dinosaur, we decided to measure a Diplodocus which was a huge 20 metres long and 5 metres tall, it took a long time to measure out and took up the whole yard! just imagine that dinosaur walking around!!! Having finished 'Dinosaurs' we moved on to discovering the world where we have been looking at a map of the world and all the countries, we brought in pictures of our holidays and have put them up on our giant world map. We are still discovering the world and will also be looking at animals and transport. As part of our topic we have been on a trip to 'Techniquest' where we had lots of fun and learnt lots of new things and by the end we were all very tired. We still have lots to learn in the next two weeks of school and are all looking forward to the summer holidays. Have a lovely and safe summer holidays.

On Thursday 31st March we made our way to Cardiff to visit the Millennium Stadium. Unfortunately we were unable to include Roath park in our plans due to the weather. However, we had our classroom picnic before we left and the children were very excited. It was a brilliant afternoon and the children were full of it on our return. We experienced the DVD which showed us how it was built, famous people that have visited and the different events that take place in the stadium. We were able to see inside the changing rooms and we saw all the rugby players kits laid out in their own named booths, and the tour guide explained to us how they warm up and use the gym facilities in the changing rooms. We had to imagine a stadium full with supporters and walk through the tunnel onto the field, with cheering fans - this was amazing!! There was lots to see and even more steps to climb and we had a fab time!!

On Wednesday 23rd March we celebrated maths throughout the school, focusing on our problem solving skills. It was a beautiful day, and so we had activities inside and outside. Outside the classroom we had to work in our teams to put each other in order of height, we drew around each other with chalk on the floor and created our charts from tallest to shortest. We also had use of the water tray using different size bottles, cups, jugs and containers and we were predicted how many of each it would take to fill our buckets, and writing our results on the whiteboard. We had lots of fun with the water again!! Inside the classroom we were making number bond fish. We had to cut and stick the fish heads to the tails to make 12. We got very sticky and some fish were trying to escape!!! We also used our problem solving 'Stile' boards, which was very tricky at first but once we got the hang of it, we were solving lots of tricky problems.

World Water Day was celebrated on Tuesday 22nd March, children were dressed in blue and it was a fun packed day, with lots of sun, splashes and competitions. We held a 'Welly Throwing Competition' and Mrs Whitcombe and Mrs lloyd had to 'duck' quite e few times!!! Dafydd Pratchett came 1st, Kieran Saunders came 2nd and Amelie Williams came 3rd. We finished our day off with a cup of cold squash with ice cubes and a biscuit. We discussed the importance of our water, and how lucky we are to have water readily available. We had a wonderful day, lots of fun, and lots of tired children (and teachers) going home!!

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On Thursday 17th February you are invited to our class assembly. We aim to be ready for 9:00am in the main hall where refreshments will be served. Our Spring topic is 'Splish, Splash, Splosh' and we will be sharing our learning so far with you. We hope you can come to our class assembly, we look forward to seeing you.

Tuesday 14th December was our Christmas trip to Brecon Mountain Railway. We had a picnic party in the class before we went and then had sing songs all the way on the bus. We had a lovely ride on the train and we saw animals, snow, a lake, and beautiful mountains as we sang along to more Christmas songs. We saw Father Christmas in his shed and we told him what we would like for Christmas, he said we were allowed a small present to take home because its not Christmas yet!! All the children were given a little rucksack with presents inside to keep them going until 'real' Christmas comes. A lovely afternoon, the cold weather, Christmas singing and a mince pie for the teachers made it a very festive outing. Thank you to our parent volunteers for helping on this trip! Merry Christmas !

We have had lots of fun in class Whitcombe preparing for Christmas. We have Christmas music playing throughout the day, and the children are getting really excited.
After our Christmas performances we posted our letters to Santa, they went to a very special place where Santa is able to read them and send a reply. We were very excited last week when we had special envelopes delivered to school, Santa has received our letters and is busy getting ready for Christmas!!
In class we have been busy making Christmas cards, calendars, sewing up our own sparkly baubles, baking biscuits and decorating crackers. We have had lots of fun with glue, scissors, glitter, sequins, computers and lots of colour. We hope mums and dads at home like the creative activities as much as the children enjoyed doing them.

This year's year one Christmas performance was a very exciting 'Whoops A Daisy Angel'. The main part played by Hayley Griffiths was from Class Whitcombe, and a well played 'Whoopsie' she was to. The children were fantastic, they learnt their spoken words, and song words with enthusiasm and 100% effort every time and all the year one staff thoroughly enjoyed putting this performance together. It is definitely worth all the hard work when you see the children perform and enjoy themselves each time they are on stage. Well done year one children !!